For some reason having ignored it for months, I just turned my attention to Sea of Thieves right at the start of the spring release season.

The game is pretty much exactly what you think it is if you've watched any gameplay. If you haven't watch anything, you're a pirate who goes adventuring either solo or in a group from 2-4 total. Every time you enter the game your group is randomly inserted into a server with up to 99 other players. As a group you complete 'voyages' you get from NPCs on outpost islands which generally involve travel to uninhabited islands to retrieve goods.

More detailed:

You select a character from a crop of randomly generated pirates. Facial features, body shape, and skin color are the only features that can't be customized and you can regenerate new designs until you get one you like.

Each time you play, including at creation, you decide between two sizes of boats based off the number of other players in your crew.

You (and any crew) wake up in the bar of a randomly determined outpost with the boat at the dock. This outpost, like all others, have a bar (for flavor mainly, also an endgame NPC I can't interact with yet), a clothing & accessories shop, a weapons shop, an equipment shop, a ship parts shop, and one representative of the three game factions.

You have one of every weapon and tool in the game permanently in your inventory, along with most of the clothing options and hairstyles (including beards) found on the generated pirates from character creation for immediate customization. All new weapons, equipment, and ship parts are reskins and the clothing has no stats. Items and equipment are all equal from character creation to end game.

Your boat has three types of consumables. Wood planks are used to repair damage to your ship. Bananas restore health. I'll let you guess what cannonballs get used for. All of these items can be found on your ship in limited, but ample, quantities in containers with limitless capacity. You can only carry a low number of each item on your person. There are containers with each type of item on almost all islands, with abundances on outpost islands. I'm not sure how these resources spawn in the barrels, but ship supply is not persistent through log-off, I have never dropped under what you start with on the ship, nor have I found an island that didn't have at least as much as I can carry of each resource.

If you die you show up on a 'ghost ship' and are given an unseen death timer before respawning on your boat. If your boat is destroyed a mermaid will show up and you will respawn on an outpost island with a new ship (unsure exactly how this works in groups).

Actual gameplay outside of wanton exploration (which will at most get you an item turn-in without a voyage, but they're rare) consists of completing voyages for one of three groups.Gold Hoarders: These are the voyages you saw from beta. You get one or more treasure maps showing an island. You need to find the island on your sea chart, go there and dig up the treasure. Higher level voyages add obtuseness such as riddles instead of marks.Order of Souls: Get a bounty for a skeleton which names an island. Go to that island and kill skeletons until the named skeleton shows up, kill it. Higher level voyages add greater numbers of better armed skeletons.Merchant Alliance: Get an request for certain animals from a specific outpost and a deadline. Unlike the other quests you are given items from the local faction npc when starting the voyage. Go to uninhabited islands and capture the animals. Higher level quests seem to only change the type of animal (chickens first, then the faster pigs, then the snakes that can kill you).

Merchant Alliance voyages end when you successfully deliver the correct animals to the requesting outpost. The Order and The Hoarders voyages end when you claim the item, which can then be turned in by anyone for the monetary and reputation rewards. This is where we get into most of the multiplayer interaction and the pirating actually comes into play.

This is all quite a lot of fun, except for the other people. My interactions with other players have been two galleons immediately firing on my docked sloop and looting it, one pair in another sloop blocking me in and boarding before deciding my skull collection wasn't worth the bother of stealing, and one guy who seemed to not realize he was on VOIP talking to someone else with a baby crying in the background and I never even saw his ship nevermind him.

So if anyone has already sunk $60 into this bad boy (on console or PC, crossplay) I could use a few more nakama if I want to make pirate king. Zed I'm looking at you(r game history).

I think I was looking at this a while ago like it was some kind of holy grail for a fun pirate game I would love to play (especially since a friend and I are always looking for good co-op multiplayer games), but it turned out it's way out of my current machine's league (and requires Win 10, which is not quite a dealbreaker, but comes close).

François wrote:...do we have another Zed and I'm doing this thing where someone waves at you and you wave back and oops they were waving at someone behind you?

*Stares past Zed at Bal who is standing just behind him*

Turns out ZephyrBal is close enough to ZedPower to trick my mind on a quick look.

Esperath wrote:Or we could just play Puzzle Pirates.

Remember the special feeling you got when you were finally able to make a red or black garment? Well now you can feel that joy every week when you pay real dollars to prevent those clothes from degrading. Among other such new joys.

I will agree with anyone who argues that this game isn't worth $60 right now.

That said, the amount of people lambasting the game for releasing unfinished tend to make me laugh. Minecraft STILL doesn't give you anything to do, and that game has made more money than God.

Combat could make you wish for a return to Skyrim, You can only access progressively harder voyages (harder basically = longer, making short sessions less and less possible as you progress), and all mechanics around other players are lacking for both your crew and especially non-crew.

Of those three issues, only the last I could see improving enough to change a person's experience with the game. I see this as a social MMO, similar to Glitch or even, again, Minecraft. If they took out all PVP and replaced it with the ability to trade consumables and gold I would be playing this game for a year nonstop just so I could be a weirdo traveling salesman. But I do not expect any new factions, special voyages, or end game raids will make the "sail to island, get item, sail it back to another island" any more complex than it already is.

beatbandito wrote:Combat could make you wish for a return to Skyrim, You can only access progressively harder voyages (harder basically = longer, making short sessions less and less possible as you progress), and all mechanics around other players are lacking for both your crew and especially non-crew.

That is very bad and is the first seriously discouraging thing I've read about this game. :(

Mothra was lamenting the dearth of content over at Select Button just yesterday. It does sound like it's promising, even if that promise hasn't been realized yet. Too bad the only online game I play now is Hearthstone...

beatbandito wrote:Combat could make you wish for a return to Skyrim, You can only access progressively harder voyages (harder basically = longer, making short sessions less and less possible as you progress), and all mechanics around other players are lacking for both your crew and especially non-crew.

That is very bad and is the first seriously discouraging thing I've read about this game. :(

It's definitely limiting. The crossroads here is that right now it works for what they're doing. Playing solo is intended to be sub-optimal and group play is built for longer runs. In a group setting more maps in one voyage just means less individual voyages. The question will be if they change things to make single player more welcoming, I feel like quality of life improvements like options for shorter or longer voyages will start to turn up naturally. I'm just not sure the game is built for those changes.

Also of note, getting an individual item generally takes the same amount of time regardless of the voyage level (other than some frustrating riddles) and you can at any time decide you're done and turn in the items you've already collected (except for merchant voyages) and you'll cover the cost of a voyage several times over with one map's rewards.

Minecraft's a weird comparison with anything else, the thing is driven by player creations and modding to the point that it's more operating system than game. (People have written complete MMOs in Minecraft.) The only thing it's actually like is Zzt.

If Sea of Thieves supported private servers and evolved 10% of that ecosystem of modding tools I suspect no-one would ever find my dessicated husk.